Small Island

It isn't an exaggeration to state that Andrea Levy's Small Island was 2004's book of the year. Not only did it scoop the Whitbread Novel of the Year award, it also garnered Levy the Orange Prize for fiction and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.

Despite its literary kudos, Small Island is far from being a novel accessible only to those who prefer hard-line literary reads. Written in a series of first-person narratives, Levy's writing style is immediately engaging, occasionally darkly witty and weaves together several cleverly constructed and page-turning story lines.

Set in Britain and its commonwealth countries of the 1940s, Levy utilises four non-stereotypical characters to highlight (often ironically) the experiences of Jamaicans arriving in London just after World War Two. Through the eyes of Jamaican protagonists Gilbert and his uptight wife Hortense, the personal perspectives of island upbringing are starkly contrasted by their perceptions of pre and post war-torn London. While Gilbert endures racism from American GIs during his stint as an airman in the RAF, Hortense plans her escape from the West Indies, buys herself passage to England and endeavours to remain secure in the illusion of her own superiority to almost everyone she encounters.
Through Queenie, Gilbert's landlady, the reader experiences a forthright and almost voyeuristic account of living through the blitz, as well as sharing her escape from a life of farm labour by enduring a marriage of convenience. The horror she sees as the bombs rain down around London is only tampered by her peculiar relationship with her father-in-law, the mysterious disappearance of her husband, and her night of passion with an airman that explains her 'liberal' predilections towards her West Indian lodgers. Her repressed husband Bernard's narrative, not only adds another twist to the subjective reality evoked by the other characters' point of view, it pulls in other nation's experience of colonialism - most notably that of India.

Levy writes both genders with equal brilliance and luminosity, and while the issues of racism, displacement, war and sex are prevalent in the narrative, there?s nothing overtly 'preachy' about this deservedly much-lauded novel.